Margaret Bourke-White, June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971) was an American photographer and documentary photographer, the first American female war photojournalist.
After being brought on by TIME Magazine to cover industry and business for Fortune in 1929, “a position that gave her a front-row seat to the aftermath of the stock-market crash, she was hired as LIFE magazine’s first female staff photographer.”
Her photograph on the cover of the first issue of Life magazine was a shot of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana on the cover of the magazine’s inaugural issue, dated Nov. 23, 1936.
“In her riveting 1963 autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White herself recalls the heady experience working for LIFE — on the debut issue, and on countless subsequent assignments for what would become one of the indispensable weeklies of the past 100 years.” Her autobiography, Portrait of Myself, became a bestseller.
After the war, she documented the final years of Mahatma Gandhi’s life, producing the iconic image of the Gandhi with his spinning wheel, among others.
In 1953, Bourke-White developed her first symptoms of Parkinson’s disease and died from it 18 years later.
